Making Literature Travel

The on-going project Coastal Echoes builds on our previous eco-poetry collaborations in Kerala, and more recently in Turkey and Greece.  Aiming to explore shared environmental concerns and broader relationships with nature and non-human species to create new poetry and audiovisual work that will address the challenges and uncertainties of climate change and loss of biodiversity, the project envisions new forms of engagement through the transformative potential of artistic practice. In a broader sense, it underlines the connections between artists living in coastal regions and countries with maritime history, in this case England, Greece, India and Wales. You can read more about the previous project in Kerala here and watch short videos on our YouTube channel here.

At Literature Across Frontiers, we have a long record of cooperation and partnerships with Indian festivals, book fairs, publishers and educational institutions, connecting dozens of literary practitioners over the past fifteen years . These connections have resulted in multiple outcomes, including showcases, publications and interactions with young people, students and general audiences. In 2025, we continued developing our partnership with the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters.

Coastal Echoes in Kerala brought together poets and artists from Wales, England, Greece and India in a six-day workshop during which they workedd with the local branch of the NGO Positive Change for Marine Life and created a new collaborative performance for the MBIFL.

Watch a short video about the project here:

Participants

From England

Luna Montenegro and Adrian Fisher are poets and artists based in London where Luna moved from her native Chile. They collaborate in a fluid space of visual, physical, and sonic research, and their work investigates ideas of improvisation, participation, politics, poetics, locality and social transformation exploring the boundaries of human and non-human existence. Under the collective name ‘montenegrofisher’, they have made performances, texts, videos, visual and sound installations, images and curatorial projects worldwide, as they seek ideas that foster a more supportive and sustainable world for all beings to share and thrive in. Their work has been shown in the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London, Southbank Centre, London, CCCB (Centro de Cultura Contemporánea) in Barcelona, Chile’s MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Santiago, Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Venice Biennale, among many others. They have been selected for international art residencies in France, Mexico, Belgium, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland. Their collective and individual works have been published in poetry and art journals in Chile, Germany, Mexico, UK and USA.

From Wales

Catrin Menai is an artist working between Bethesda in north Wales and Glasgow. She creates narrative-driven works using the communicative potential of everyday objects, gestures, and place. Through film, writing and found objects, and grounded as much in chance encounter as in close study, she explores ways of thinking-with our world, considering love and loss as a material space for knowledge-making. Here, poetic fragments, correspondences and archival materials are layered to perform a series of call-and-responses: between languages, eras and geographies. Her work has been exhibited in the Welsh galleries Mostyn and The Turner House, and published with the Artes Mundi Journal and Poetry Wales. She participated in Touching Syria, a collaborative project at Pontio Arts Centre. She completed an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2021.

Zoë Skoulding is a poet and literary critic interested in translation, sound and ecology. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University and author of five poetry collections, including A Marginal Sea (Carcanet Press, 2022) and Footnotes to Water (2019), which won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020, and other publications. She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry, and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Her critical work includes two monographs, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (2013), and Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (2020). She has initiated and developed several large-scale projects supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, such as Metropoetica, a collaborative project on translation, gender and city space. She was Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales 2008-2014 and co-founded the (North) Wales International Poetry Festival in 2012.

From India

Sampurna Chattarji is a Mumbai-based writer, editor, translator and teacher with twenty-one publications to her credit. These include Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins 2015, 2020), written while on residency at the University of Kent, Canterbury; Dirty Love(Penguin 2013), her short story collection about Bombay/Mumbai; and Wordygurdyboom! (Puffin Classics 2008), her translation of Sukumar Ray’s poetry and prose. Her translation of Joy Goswami’s prose poems After Death Comes Water (Harper Perennial, 2021) has been lauded as a recreation of the Bangla originals in ‘a living voice, as inventive and vivid as the English of Joyce’. Sampurna’s work as an editor includes Future Library (Red Hen Press 2022) an anthology of contemporary Indian writing released in the US. The most recent of her eleven poetry titles is Unmappable Moves, just out from Mumbai-based indie-press Poetrywala. She can be found on Instagram as @ShampooChats.

Anitha Thampi is a Malayalam poet whose work has been translated into many Indian and foreign languages. She has published five collections of poetry to significant critical acclaim: Muttamatikkumpol (While Sweeping the Front Yard, 2004), Azhakillaathavayellam (All That Are Bereft of Beauty, 2010), Alappuzha Vellam (Alappuzha Water, 2016), Dŵr Arall / A Different Water (2018) and Muringa Vazha Kariveppu (Moringa Plantain Curry Tree, 2023). Her translations into Malayalam include writings of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Carlo Collodi, Les Murray and Mourid Barghouti. She lives in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

From Greece

Katerina Iliopoulou is an award-winning poet, editor, translator and literary curator who lives and works in Athens. She is the author of five poetry books, a book of poetry and photography, a collection of short stories, and a novel awaiting publication. She has also edited collections of essays on poetics. Her poetry has been extensively translated and published in literary reviews, journals and anthologies. She has participated in numerous festivals and co-organized and curated a series of projects that combine poetry with visual arts and performance and seek a different relationship with public space and the audience. Since 2013 she is the editor-in-chief of FRMK (FaRMaKo), a cutting edge journal in print on poetry, theory and the visual arts. She is also the editor of the Odradek series of short poetry and prose booklets from FRMK editions. Her translations include the work of Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman in collaboration with her sister Eleni Iliopoulou. From 2015 to 2019 she collaborated with the Onassis Foundation’s Cavafy Archive on teaching the poet in public schools, was the director of the Young Writers’ Festival at the Thessaloniki International Book Fair. Since 2022 she is the Greek partner of the Berlin based international platform for poetry, lyrikline.org.

Project curator

Alexandra Büchler is a cultural manager, literary curator, translator, and editor. Born in Prague, she has lived in Egypt, Greece, Australia and the United Kingdom.  As founding director of the European platform Literature Across Frontiers she has developed a number of large international literary projects spanning cities and regions through collaborative encounters and exchange residencies. She has more than twenty-five books in different genres to her name as translator and editor between her native Czech, Greek and English, and she was the series editor of New Voices from Europe and Beyond bilingual poetry anthologies from Arc Publications 2006-2016. Her recent anthologies of writing by emerging European authors are Zero Hours on the Boulevard (2018) and Ulysses’ Cat (2022).

The visit of participants from Wales was supported by Wales Arts International, and we are grateful to the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters for their generous support.